The popularity of the Internet, and in particular, the portion of the Internet known as the World Wide Web, continues to grow. The World Wide Web is basically a collection of computers that are operatively linked together through a plurality of communication networks. Typically, users access the World Wide Web through a personal computer or like device, which is connected to the Internet via a modem of some type. For example, many users of the World Wide Web connect to the Internet using a dial-up telephone networked modem configured to establish data communications through an Internet Services Provider (ISP). Other users connect to the Internet with a faster modem, e.g., a cable modem, digital subscriber line (DSL) modem, etc.
Regardless of how a user ultimately connects to the Internet/World Wide Web, once connected the user typically accesses information available therein by using a web browser or like application. A web browser is configured to access web pages that are provided through the Internet by other computers. For example, one or more web server computers may be connected to the Internet and configured with one or more web sites or other supporting web applications. A web site typically has one or more static web pages and/or is capable of supplying one or more dynamically generated web pages that the user may selectively download, view and possible interact with.
To identify a particular web site/page the user will typically select a hyper link to the desired web site/page or may choose to manually enter a unique name for the web site/page. The most common name used for identifying a web site/page is known as the uniform resource locator (URL). By entering a URL, the user will be connected to an appropriate web server which hosts the applicable web application(s), and the requested web page will be downloaded, in this case using a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), to the web browser. Within the Internet itself, the selected URL is associated with a specific Internet Protocol (IP) address. This IP address takes the form of a unique numerical identifier, which has been assigned to the targeted web server. Thus, a user may also directly enter an IP address in the web browser. However, the majority of users tend to favor the use of the more easily remembered and entered URL.
A web server application typically receives the web request from the web browser and provides it to a web application or worker process. The worker process responds to the web request and eventually generates a web request response that is then sent back to the web browser.
There is a continuing desire to provide a quick response from the worker process and to make good use of available web server resources. One bottleneck that has existed in many web servers are delays associated with preparing the web request response to be sent back to the web browser(client). Here, for example, for various reasons, portions of the web request response may be spread apart within the web server's memory. As such, before the web server can send the response to the client there is a need to assemble these portions into a contiguous section of memory. This is a burden on the web server's resources, such as the memory, and also requires a certain amount of time to perform.
As such, there is need for improved methods, apparatuses and systems that provide for improved web request response handling.